The Typical Principle
Isaac Wilhelm, National University of Singapore
Abstract: If a proposition is typically true, then so long as you have no evidence to the contrary, you should believe that proposition; or so I argue here. In this paper, I propose and defend a principle of rationality—call it the `Typical Principle’—which links rational belief to facts about what is typical. As I show, this principle avoids several problems that other, seemingly similar principles face. And as I show, in many cases, this principle implies the verdicts of the Principal Principle: much of what the Principal Principle says about rational credence, in other words, follows from the Typical Principle.
foundationsofprobabilityseminar.com 